"I created the game on a holiday without internet access, so I had to find out from the Arc sources how to do things and missed arcfn."
That's a great story. Can you elaborate on your experiences with arc? What languages have you programmed in before? What led you to arc? Compared to previous languages what did you like and dislike about arc?
Sure, at my day job I code in C++ and some C#. Paul Grahams essays got me interested in arc, so when it came out I just had to try it. I never got around really creating something with it was still on my laptop that I took with me on a holiday.
The card game was taught me by my in-laws and it seemed a nicely sized project to create an arc version of it. At the beginning it felt a bit weird and I was writing very clunky functions, but after a while some patterns seemed to emerge and I could reduce the code size. At the end I was impressed that the whole thing only took around 600 lines of code including test code.
I did some functional programming in the past: Erlang, LISP and a bit of Haskell, all just for fun. What I like about arc is that it feels like the only limit is your own brain and not the language. I also like that the implementation of the language is at the same level as the program you're writing. If you feel like changing the language, you can, and quickly try what happens. It takes some time to get used to the form and syntax, though. An additional downside is that C++ and C# start to feel limiting.. You can do a lot with templates and delegates but it feels ugly.
Oh yes, learning lisp has made me more unhappy when working on non-lisps.
"it feels like the only limit is your own brain and not the language."
That's a great way to put it.
Of course, you do eventually run into limits in any language. But arc's gotten several people working on pushing them back. All the implementations at the bottom of https://sites.google.com/site/arclanguagewiki/home are about breaking some limitation or other.
